TUV needs an option in kickstart to turn off NM for designated cards.  Btw, NM_CONTROLLED="no" in ifcfg-eth0 is not sufficient.  When you do this, I lose DNS as well since apparently, NetworkManager usurps dhcp-client's role in this.  When I chkconfig NetworkManager off, everything works.

So I now have that in my kickstart script for my desktops.

Is Enterprise Linux mostly installed on laptops?  I would have thought that desktops still make a large fraction of its deployment.  In fact I would almost bet on it since Linux is still not trouble-free when it comes to installing on laptops.  In which case, it seems like a really bad idea to foist the NetworkManager on people.


On 04/06/2012 01:28 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 02:46:50PM -0500, Ken Teh wrote:
>> Is it true that the network manager service turns off the network when there is no activity?
>
> Think of it this way.
>
> The network manager was invented to handle Wifi on laptops. (And it works well enough for that).
>
> When used for any other purpose, well, what do you expect, it was not invented for that.
>
> This is the new-think engineering through the "but it works on my laptop!" paradigm.
>
> In practice. I use the network manager on most server-type computers (as it comes
> pre-installed, pre-enabled with SL6). As long as you remember to open the network
> connection editor and enable the right "available to all users" and "enable on boot"
> buttons, it seems to work well enough, as long as nothing goes wrong.
>
> When things go wrong in server-type-specific ways, well the network manager does
> not know what to do, even for the simplest cases, like the network link going
> down for an hour (maintenance of UPS power to the network switch). I have seen
> it drop it's IP address and never ask for another one (should have issued
> a DHCP request when network link came back up, then maybe should have tried
> again every hour). I have also seen the network manager drop it's IP address
> (and never ask for another one) after an eth device hang (eth chip vs driver
> compatibility) when a simple "ifconfig down/up" would have recovered the system.
>
> I tend to think that these days one should go back to static IP addresses
> for server-type machines, after all, all DHCP, network manager&  co do is assign
> the same IP address to the same machine over and over and over again with the only
> variation when they fail to do the boring thing and you have a machine down, staying
> down until somebody physically walks to it to reboot it.
>